The Vanishing Village
by All The Umbrellas In London
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Adra. For the first nine years of her life, living in the village Connestoga, nothing happened. Then a mysterious man and his pretty friend with pretty red hair appeared, and people started vanishing...


**Featuring the Doctor and Amy, as played by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan.**

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Adra.

For the first nine years of Adra's life, nothing happened.

She spent her days at school, on the same uncomfortable wooden stool. She wore the same scratchy cotton dress, read the same missives as her classmates around her, as her elder sister before her. Spilt ink on her blotter, every now and then got some on her clothes. She lived in the village of Connestoga, and she'd never, not once, left.

She sat by herself at play time, watching the other children sit in circles, watched the boys play games. Then, after lessons, she'd go home; she'd heard tell, once or twice, that home is where the heart is.

For her, home was where her parents and her six brothers and sisters were.

Adra was a quiet girl; she liked quiet. She enjoyed quiet. Home was anything but quiet. She'd help with the younger ones, then she'd do her homework, then she'd dutifully help cook and clear the table.

Finally, she'd climb into the bed she shared with her older sister, and she pulled out the little zap light her mother had gotten her for her ascension the year before.

She'd read, until exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep. On nights when she couldn't find her light, or when her sister demanded she switch it off, she stared out the window at the stars and try to imagine what was out there.

Adra liked to read; she loved it. She read everything she could get her hands on, and she read what she could find over and over and over again. She had all of the school missive memorised, and she'd mown through every last book in her house; most days, as much as she hated being alone, she longed to get back to school, and read something new.

Adra was a special little girl, who had led a singularly dull life that unfortunately wasn't that unusual for her people; but then the man came, him and his friend.

Adra saw the two of them running down the main street one day, out of breath and smeared with mud. Had they been out in the forest? Over the valley to the south? No one Adra had ever met had been past the hills on the other side, nor across the lake to the north. But there was something alien about these two; Adra simply had to follow them. After all, that was why she read.

No one left Connestoga, or the valley or went across the lake, because no one had to; Adra, however, wanted to. This made her the object of some concern on the part of her parents.

A few days after she first saw the man and the girl who ran just half a step behind him, like she was always trying to keep up, people started going missing.

Adra didn't put two and two together; she didn't connect the man with the missing.

She was a lateral thinker, not a literal thinker, after all, but her father, the village protector, the second most important man alive, after the fat and balding magistrate, called a town meeting.

Eight people had gone missing, he pointed out. Three men, four women and a child.

This made Adra pay attention; in a few of her books, and in several of the more morally minded missives, missing children indicated when things were really wrong.

Had anyone seen anything unusual lately, her father said, frowning, scanning the assembled villagers, as though trying to scare the answers out into the open where he could pounce on it. Adra giggled at the thought of her big, strong father leaping into the mud to wrestle Answer, which she visualised as a small grey cat, into submission.

Adra didn't mention the man and the woman, but someone else did. There was a general uproar, but then the meeting was over.

Clutching her sister's hand on the walk home, Adra saw something moving in the shadows between the fishmonger's and the tailor's. She let go of her sister, and ran to the shadows; her sister screamed and ran after her.

"Adra?" she called.

Adra didn't answer. She'd found the man: he was tall, with very pale skin and deep-set eyes and an easy smile and floppy hair, all of which just screamed handsome. Adra found herself blushing, ever so slightly; even more when she saw his friend over his shoulder. Willowy, with long red hair that Adra couldn't help but gawp at, she was the prettiest thing Adra had ever seen.

Adra demanded to know who these people were, adding a warning; the village would start looking for them soon. She clamped a hand to her mouth a second later, unsure why she'd said those things.

The man cocked an eyebrow, and offered a smile, some kind words.

Adra had to ask: "Are you going to make me disappear, too?"

The man looked at the girl, and both of them shared a very significant look. Adra had never been sure what exactly a significant look was, but she was sure she had just witnessed one pass between these two good looking strangers.

The man said that he wouldn't, that he and his friend were trying to stop the disappearances.

Adra's sister called her name again in the dark.

The man told her to keep their presence secret; Adra wanted to know why. The man said he couldn't tell her, but that he had to trust her.

Adra had always been puzzled by that word, 'trust', never positive what it meant.

She asked why, genuinely curious.

Her sister called her name again, getting closer.

The man leant close, putting his hand on Adra's shoulder and looking deep, deep into her eyes. Adra's sister called again, and then he and his friend, the pretty girl with her pretty red hair, vanished.

Adra's sister found her, gave her a slap for running off, and said that if she did it again their father would do much much worse, but Adra didn't care. She went home with her wrist encased in her sister's vice like grip, but the whole time she couldn't feel anything but a slightly tingling where the man had touched her.

As she went to sleep that night, she wondered if perhaps she was in love.

She woke up to utter pandemonium. Pandemonium was her favourite word. One of the first she'd learnt to spell, and she could see it, all through the village.

Twenty more people had vanished, her mother told her breathlessly.

Adra was shocked, and thought that she should tell her father about the man. Then she felt the tingle on her shoulder, and decided against it. She went to school, but there were empty chairs in the classroom, and when she got home that afternoon, walking through oddly empty streets, her father told her another thirty people had vanished.

Her mother was almost in tears; half the village, she kept wailing, at random intervals.

Adra was still feeling that tingle when she drifted off to sleep that night, beside her sister. When she woke up, her sister was gone, and Adra frowned. She wandered through her house, and found no one; no evidence of breakfast in the kitchen. It was as though everyone had just... vanished.

Adra's eyes shot open, and she ran through the village, barefoot in her nighty, shouting and screaming for someone. For anyone.

No one answered.

Adra was alone. Utterly, terrifyingly alone.

She was horrified, for a moment, and then a creeping note of jubilation flitted through her; alone, oh but this is fantastic, I can explore wherever I want! And then her stomach rumbled and she realised she was hungry, and she sat on an empty porch and she cried.

It felt like an eternity later when she heard footsteps. She looked up, and through tear-filled eyes, she saw him. The man.

She called out to him, and he ran to her.

He called her by name, and she wondered how he knew it; he said that his friend was gone, and that he needed Adra's help to find her. Adra demanded to know what happened to her friends, to her family, to her sister and her mother and her father. What had happened to her entire village.

The man looked at her for a second, his eyes right into hers; Adra wanted to maintain eye contact, as she had been taught was polite, but she just couldn't. Those eyes were too old, older even then her grandmother, who had died two harvests ago.

The man said to her, "Adra, you're not well."

How would you know, she wanted to scream, but stayed silent; she started to shake, and the tears started to flow again. I don't believe you! she bellowed in her mind.

"Trust me," he said, and his words sang through the air, "I'm the Doctor."

He touched his hands to either side of her head, and Adra's eyes widened. She could see everything, so much; a metal bird, up in the heavens, so many people, so many people. A giant wasp. Why could she see a giant wasp? Talking grey men with sticks that spat fire, metal beasts screaming in the dark, a lonely blonde woman, fire and flood and ice and rage, and a lonely little boy.

Adra wanted to scream, and she wanted to cry. She was so lonely...

Adra, he was saying, though not in so many words; not in any words at all. Adra, can you hear me?

I hear you, she said in response, though she didn't speak. For a second, she had the horrifying thought that she'd never said a word in her life. I want to go home. I want my family back.

I know you do, Adra, I'm just trying to find them...

There was a flash; it came through her again. A blonde man, laughing his head off, an old man and a little girl, like her but so different, so many faces, all of them laughing, all of them loving; she saw corridors, and whole worlds. Is this my head, she asked him, is this what's inside me?

The man swallowed, but did not speak. Was he in pain?

No Adra, he said finally. "That's my head. You have a head all your own. I'm trying to give it back. Trying to put it right."

Then the faces began to change; she saw her classmates, her mother and her father and the whole of Connestoga take shape; gone was the fire, the ice. Everything was coming home, everything was taking shape. She felt her mother in the kitchen, her sister in their bed.

Adra's eyes flew open; she hadn't even realised they were closed.

The man was gone. Adra fell to the ground in a dead faint.

* * *

The Doctor and Amy Pond looked down at her little face, obscured behind the clouded glass of the cryogenic capsule; they were surrounded by hundreds of the same, but every single one of them was dark.

"Can we do anything for her, Doctor? I mean, we can't just leave her adrift in space for another fifty years," Amy said, and the Doctor could hear unshed tears in her voice.

The Doctor took a deep breath; it rattled through him, and he felt as ancient as she ever had.

The TARDIS had brought the two of them to the colony ship Connestoga purely by chance; he'd set it on random, and this is where they'd ended up. Fifty years after a catastrophic power failure had disabled all but one of the cryogenic capsules bearing the Connestoga's colonists to their new homeworld.

They'd died, never knowing that the Connestoga would drift in space with just a little girl inside.

She'd been kept alive in suspended animation for fifty years, and the Connestoga's computer system had tapped into her mind, slightly psychic as it was and exacerbated by some unknown, and potentially unknowable spatial phenomena, creating a whole world, an entire village called Connestoga.

"The ship's power cells will run out eventually," the Doctor said simply.

Amy gaped for a second, aghast. "But, Doctor... she'll die."

"She'll die if we wake her up," the Doctor said, evenly. "She's too connected to the computer systems. After all this time, all this inactivity, her brain wouldn't be able to survive without it. Besides, it's been fifty years... everyone she ever knew is probably lying in this ship with her, and everyone else is already dead. She's nine years old..."

It pained him to say ship; it wasn't a ship, it was a tomb. A monument, to the power of one lonely little girl's imagination.

"Exactly, Doctor. She's nine!"

The Doctor looked sideways at his Companion. She blinked at him, insistent. "She was happy, Amy. You and I managed to clear the system, defragment the drives. It will last until the power runs out. She was happy, in that village in the computer, and I think we owe it to her to let her stay happy."

"I..." Amy faltered.

"Come on, Amy," the Doctor said, "there's someone we _can_ save not far away."

They walked away, leaving the one working cryogenic capsule and the little girl inside to their fate amongst the stars...

* * *

Little Adra dreamt of a room full of metal, the man, the Doctor, and his friend, looking down at a metal case, with a glass lid; she strained to see what was inside...

She woke up what felt like seconds later, and she didn't even need to open her eyes to know she was in her father's arms. She didn't need to listen to hear the village was back, to know that everything was right, and everything was warm. That night, she didn't bother with her light.

She just started out the window, at the stars, and for some reason she thought of them as hers. And when she fell asleep, every now and then, she saw a giant wasp...

Regardless of the details, the fact remains: the little girl named Adra lived happily ever after.


End file.
